I've been separated from Sam for 20 months now, living separately, anyway. We're not divorced and we're not even truly separate. We don't know what we are.

I don't know anyway. Sam, he still wants it all back and me, I don't know how to finish letting go.

This Arizona vacation was my second family visit since the split. The first was Thanksgiving, a month after I left and I was too numb then to remember much of the trip.

In that year of firsts, everything is hard. Everything takes re-calibration. Everything is viewed through the lens of change. The difference is so glaring it's difficult to feel anything else.

This visit was the reminder about how time heals. Doesn't feel like it in the long slow recovery, but it's true. Regeneration comes.

Being with my family, just my kids and I, felt natural and comfortable and right. Now I realize during that first year when I went to Arizona without him, to friends' parties without him, to holiday celebrations without him, so much of what I missed was the familiarity of things being as they were.

For 13 years he was by my side. A lot of those times weren't so good.

With the habit of being together faded, I don't miss having him on trips, at parties, at holiday celebrations.

I realize something. I like myself better on my own. I like who I am and how I relate to other people better this way.

Right now there's false sense of something, because the transition isn't done. Whether we get all the way out or move back in, I still have to negotiate change.

Either way, I know — and I want you to know — transition is temporary. And, as they say, the only way out is through. But there is another side.

Being on it feels pretty darn good.